Trapped
by Kikaimegami
Summary: A wonderful tale of love, discovery, and breaking stuff.
1. Chapter 1

_Author's Comments: This is a bit of a departure from the normal Fallout Fanfiction that you will see. Trapped is a short glimpse into the life of a very unusual Super Mutant and her day-to-day struggles with the unique nature of her mind. Rated T for language._

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A guttural yelp of surprise and a loud, echoing crash upset the relative silence of the large sub-level of what used to be some kind of office building. Debris rained down through the new, jagged hole in the quite high ceiling--at least twenty feet, if not more. A lot of the crumbling ceiling fell onto the one who had fallen through it in the first place, causing the hole.

Jay shook her head, not so much to dislodge the dirt and bits of building material getting into her hair, but more in an attempt to get the room to stop spinning. Needless to say, her fall had been less than graceful, though she really wasn't one known for gracefulness--perhaps a lack of it, if anything. She finally managed to push herself up and struggle to her feet to get a look around, swiping a few tendrils of grimy, ragged hair aside that had fallen into her face with one huge hand, the hair making clanking noises from the junk stuck in it. Still more hair of questionable content fell over her face on the right--she had only cleared the left--but that mattered very little to her. A sightless, totally white eye stared unseeing between the erratic locks of hair, completely lacking a pupil and eyelids drooping ever so slightly over the worthless eye.

Despite her quite impressive height of nine feet, there was no way, not even if she jumped, for her to pull herself back out of the hole she had just made. The ceiling was way above her and she figured there could be two of her stacked without reaching it. This made her annoyed and like always, when Jay was annoyed, she tended to swear, thus the not-so-relative silence was filled with rumbling profanity for a few minutes as an unholy glare was cast at the hole, as if swearing at it would fix her current predicament.

Finally, with a deep sigh of defeat, she gave up on the hole altogether, one green eye taking in her surroundings, the slitted, cat-like pupil darting back and forth far too quickly to be a conscious effort. Once, Jay had known, just like she had known her own name and that it started with a "J", why her eye didn't quite behave itself and tended to jerk back and forth like a radroach hopped up on Jet. Like her name, though, that long forgotten knowledge was utterly lost to her. All she could remember was that the problem had a name, but not what the name was or what it had meant. She tended to just refer to it as "twitchy-eye", not that anyone ever _asked_ her about it, just like nobody asked about her blind eye, nor her hair, nor anything else, really. Super Mutants tended towards conversation that didn't go that deep.

This mutant was different, though, and not just for the hair, nor her eyes. She looked pretty much like your average Super Mutant, almost 10ft tall and built like a wall of pure muscle (though her face was a bit more mobile and she actually had lips, but she tended to pull them back in a snarl most of the time anyway, so it generally wasn't something you'd notice). It was only when you looked closer, taking note of details, that you could tell that this one was different.

Like all the others, she wore very little in the way of actual clothes--just some gray trousers that might have, at some point in the distant past, been white and a pair of big, black boots (with glittery laces that she found Atom-knows-where). Jay wore hardly any actual armor simply due to the fact that, for the most part, she had absolutely no use for it and it just got cumbersome and in the way (not to mention that anything useful as armor was generally not shiny, or hard to keep in that state). What she did have was dubious at best as far as armor and protection goes. Wrapped leather bracers covered her forearms from just under the elbow to her wrists, part of them wrapping around her hands, and longer pieces of scrap metal tied into place along them offering _some_ protection. Her boots were actually steel-toed, though not in the normal sense (Jay had taken flatter pieces of strong metal, cut them into the right shape as best she could, and bolted them on--you have to give her credit for that, the woman sure knows her way around a machine shop). The only other protection she wore was also questionable--a somewhat tattered, light brown leather "skirt" that hung from her belt and split down the front, almost like someone hacked the bottom off a trench coat and decided to wear that (and it's very likely that is what actually happened considering it was fairly short and only hung down to mid-thigh).

Besides her clothes and "armor", she did have other things on, but only because she _wanted_ them on. Naturally, one of these things was her super sledge, which she adored and treasured--it was her most prized possession--strapped across her back with a strong leather strap. Besides the strap going diagonally across her front, her chest was bare for the most part, only a few sad-looking necklaces hanging around her thick neck "covering" anything. The necklaces themselves varied in quality and design wildly, all of them found here and there and latched onto in pure joy. Obviously, they were all varying degrees of _shiny_. The reason for the necklaces also explained the bracelets that had to be augmented with other bracelets to even fit her thick wrists.

The first more obvious difference you could see at even a glance was the exceptionally long, gray hair full of bits of wire and junk, woven and braided into something like dreadlocks that usually fell just past her knees (sometimes she might use the wires to tie it up to itself, making it shorter, but usually it just went where it wanted). It never once occurred to the mutant that her hair was extremely unusual. It was just there and she made, what she thought of as, good use of it. She had absolutely no other hair anywhere else except those dirty locks and they had been with her since becoming a Super Mutant, snow white in colour at the time. Sure, some had come out along the way (mostly due to Jay having a fit or something and pulling some out), but for the most part, it remained thick and long, even if its real colour was obscured over time by dirt.

What really set her apart though, was her mind. Jay wasn't smart, not by a long shot, but she did tend to think deep thoughts, even if she usually forgot what they were not long after. She could read to some extent, but it was slow-going, needing to follow the line of text with a finger and she had to say the words out-loud to understand them, usually under her breath so that it sounded like she was grumbling to herself. What was probably the most obvious difference though, was that Jay was simply not an aggressive person. Sure, she could have her random spates of unnecessary violence, it was a genetic trait after all, but unless something attacked her first, she was fine leaving it be (well, unless it happened to look tasty at the moment and she was hungry, but that was rare and she tended to like eating things that were already dead).

Shuffling through the large, empty space of the vast basement, Jay growled unhappily. If anything, the reason she was there in the first place stated quite loud and clear that she was _not_ like most of her brothers. Most Super Mutants travel in pairs or more and finding a lone one was absolutely rare and usually because something had happened to their partner and they'd yet to reach a group. Jay had, long ago, wandered off alone and was rarely in the company of other mutants. Wandering the wastes, she simply enjoyed a fairly peaceful life in comparison. Her mission, at least what she desired in her own mind and what drove her constantly to wander, wasn't the capturing of humans, or killing of humans, or really having much to do with humans at all. Jay liked to break things, not for any malicious reason, but just for the sake of breaking them and seeing the bits and pieces that resulted. She also liked to eat things to see if they were actually edible or not (more often than not, bits of something she broke, and usually, the conclusion was often: inedible), but mostly, Jay really enjoyed some good, old-fashioned destruction.

It was why she was in the derelict, bombed-out old building to begin with. The building itself was utterly unremarkable, falling apart like pretty much every other building and looking as if it had, at some point, been a Raider camp, chunks of the building gone missing from more recent activity and graffiti on just about everything. There were no humans there now and it was pretty much the only thing for miles--the surrounding area mostly the utterly shattered remains of other structures, with a rocky, uneven area to the north. It had caught her attention due to the fact that it was _something_ and then kept her attention because it was _something that she could break_. The colourful Raider graffiti also dragged her in, as Jay could appreciate it (mostly because it was generally made up of swear words or chaotic patterns, both things she liked).

Like always though, her abysmal luck and general lack of common sense had ended up with her traversing a patch of especially unsafe floor that had finally given up the ghost with her hefty weight stomping over it. Up until that point, she'd been having the time of her life, using her super-sledge to smash holes into the walls, wooden furniture into splinters, and generally pulverize anything else she could find. Anything with graffiti survived, though, because she liked it. She had even found some new treasures to put in her already junk-filled hair which was getting quite heavy as of late and she would need to take it down soon to toss out less-worthy objects.

Said hair was getting a good scratching as Jay scratched her scalp, trying to figure out what she should do. Though she _had_ liked the hole she made via her sudden descent--it was pretty, with boards sticking out in places and rough around the edges, bits of cable and wiring dangling down into the basement--it had also dumped her _here_ where it was dark, dank, and generally colourless and depressingly boring. There wasn't even anything reflective down there to catch what little light there was.

Fingers in her hair, she paused, considering her hair for the moment. Well, she _did_ need to go through it, and that wouldn't be boring.. thusly distracted from her temporary subterranean imprisonment, Jay sat down heavily with a loud thump right where she had been standing and dragged a lock of hair in front of her left eye for inspection.

Insane as she obviously was, at some point she had realized that she could _keep_ really nice pieces of things she broke by threading them into her scraggly, nearly full-length hair. It was a dirty gray colour and absolutely _full_ of metal junk. Wires, bits of metal casings, washers, nuts, and anything else she could get to stay had been woven into it in something that resembled braids. Some things, like washers or nuts, were used more like beads, while wire was simply threaded into the mess and used to hold in the more oddly-shaped pieces. Jay liked her "shinies" and so everything residing in the dirty mop of not-quite braids was metal or if not metal, at the very least shiny.

In fact, Jay liked shiny objects so much that she had taken notice of how some humans put things _through their skin_ for decoration. This had excited her beyond sense for _weeks_ (a feat in itself as usually her attention span was about as long as a Raider's who was jeeped up on Psycho) as she tirelessly sought things that would work the way the humans used them, sometimes pulling them off dead humans directly. Though it had taken quite a few days of trial and error with various haphazardly made implements and more than a little bloodshed, she had figured out how to actually _put_ the shiny things in her skin. All she knew was that humans did it, but she had never seen _how_ it was done, and now her ears were slightly scarred from the mutilation she had inflicted upon them in her quest for something to make correctly-sized holes to put the things through. It had taken a while, but she finally settled on a stiff bit of wire that she had ground one end down into a lopsided point. It was still quite a bit blunt, but that didn't bother her much. She kept this very special, precious bit of wire in a tightly braided and short bit of hair that hung just in front of her left ear. With her thick fingers, it was difficult to work that braid out and by the time she got any headway on it, she would finally remember why it was there. It worked at any rate.

Sometimes (very often) something in her hair would get entangled with something stuck through her ears. The totally random piercings of all sizes turning her ears into something that more closely resembled Swiss cheese were notorious for latching onto the junk in her hair and being very stubborn about letting it go. At that exact moment as she undid the odd weaving and threading in her hair, removing everything that wasn't hair, Jay had gotten into a battle of wills against a wire that had thoroughly entangled itself with a couple of the rings pierced into her right ear (some being actual _rings_ and not the normal kind of ring one would put in a piercing--those she had to actually cut her ear, shove in the gash, then stitch the rest back together with whatever was handy at the moment so it would heal up, and sometimes she would just leave the improvised stitches in if she liked how they looked).

This decoration of hair had been going on as long as Jay was capable of remembering, possibly even before being changed into a Super Mutant. Indeed, there were times, such as the current moment while she picked her hair clean, she could vaguely remember it being _human_ fingers going through the hair and not the large, rough fingers of a mutant. In those rare moments of memory, other things would vaguely come to mind. It was how she knew that at some point, her name had started with a "J". She referred to herself as that for a long time and it just became Jay over time because that was, in her mind, easier to think. As her mind lapsed back into the far past, she suddenly remembered a song, though not the words, but she was fairly certain she had heard it on a radio more recently. Something about a butcher and chopping some meat, which made her smile and she tried to hum along with the tune in her mind as she worked with her hair (which honestly sounded more like grunting, truth be told--never mind how her _singing_ sounded).

Her head started bopping along to the sort-of remembered song playing in her mind and Jay actually grinned, suddenly enjoying the moment more. It was one of those rare times that something made her as happy as breaking stuff usually did, almost as blissful as when she would get her hands on a missile launcher. Little things like that could bring a sense of happiness and enjoyment every so often, usually when a little of her past trickled through enough for her to catch a piece of it before it was gone again. Starting to rock back and forth along with the music still going in her head, her "humming" getting louder and now sounding like growling, the vague memory had already passed on and she couldn't remember where the song had come from in the first place, not that it mattered all that much. Jay made a mental note to figure out what the song was and forgot about it two minutes later.

Dirty hair falling down her back and sides, pooling around her on the floor, she finally extracted the last piece of junk from it besides her "hole-poker". The pile of scrap metal she had collected from her hair was actually quite impressive and all together must have weighed quite a few pounds. Now was the more daunting task, the one that made this whole process a pain and bothersome, a task that she really didn't like at all: cleaning her junk. Every last scrap was covered with grime (as well as her hair, mind) and wasn't as _shiny_ anymore. Her treasures simply couldn't be assessed until they were at their shiniest--her hair, on the other hand, she couldn't give a damn about. It wasn't the actual act of cleaning that bugged her--she liked licking the dirt and gunk off of everything because the flavour was always different and interesting--no, the part of it she _loathed_ was simply the fact that she had to _clean_ something. Even the concept of cleaning made her shiver in revulsion.

It simply had to be done, and so she set to work, attempting to focus, as much was possible for her, on the act itself and not the concept of what she was actually doing. Jay was compulsively thorough as she cleaned up each and every piece, those small enough she went so far as to pop into her mouth, careful not to swallow them, and give them a really good spit-soaking. Sometimes she would inevitably accidentally swallow something, which was annoying, but she was extremely obsessive when it came to her treasures and so she _always_ got them back after they ran their course through her system. She could even time it now and knew when to start looking. Those got the same clean-job as everything else did, despite where they had been as it really didn't bother her all that much, indeed if she found excrement on her meandering journey and it was fresh enough to catch her nose, she usually investigated it for edibility.

As shine replaced grime, Jay relaxed a bit, now not-quite hum-growling the song anymore due to her mouth being occupied with her work. Once she actually got working on it, the cleaning bothered her less since she could forget about it and instead enjoy all the interesting tastes. It also became easier because the increasing pile of shiny objects got her excited and worked up since she would get to _sort through_ all of them and that prospect thrilled her. If Jay were to ever have reason for listing the things she loved most, it would consist of: breaking things, her super-sledge, shiny objects, checking objects for edibility, and swearing, though shiny objects and destruction were very high up there and could override all the others easily. Being stuck in basements would rate pretty low, but at the moment it was okay because of the very nice distraction.

Scooping up her highly-prized pile of treasures and pouching them in a semi-clean and mostly intact rag she always kept on her (usually for use in making sure her super sledge was kept shiny since cleaning the whole thing by mouth would take way too long and just not be worth the effort), Jay took another, more scrutinizing look around her surroundings. She knew her treasures were clean and shiny--they sparkled in the dim light--but it was just too dark to actually _look_ at them. Seeing a doorway that lead from the cavernous room she had fallen into, she perked up a little in curiosity and satisfaction, standing back up and heading for it, hoping for working lights somewhere nearby or, failing that, a way out, though escape wasn't terribly high on her list of priorities at that specific moment.

As she neared the door, she stashed her treasure-filled sort-of-a-pouch in an actual _real_ pouch hanging from her belt to keep it safe. The first room Jay came to was even darker than the one she had fallen into, though that was more the effect of there being a _hole_ in the ceiling and not any actual lighting. Though being a Super Mutant did make her senses sharper, she still stumbled around in the dark, cursing every so often when she would trip or run into something. There was no way one could _ever_ qualify Jay as a graceful person. No, instead she usually just blundered along, not paying attention to anything other than things she wanted her attention on. Clumsy wasn't even getting close to describing it.

Despite tripping over nearly everything in the room, the mutant finally located a light switch (which was conveniently placed right next to the door she had entered through) and flicked it. Another flick. One more. Fifteen flicks later, she gave up and smashed it with her super-sledge, snarling in irritation. That felt rather nice and she continued taking out her displeasure on all the vague maybe-objects in the vicinity, often swinging at empty air, but sometimes getting a satisfying crash or crunch. Now she was lost to the primal rage that came with the life-changing event of becoming a Super Mutant. There wasn't really any sense in fighting it and that tended to make her head hurt anyway, so Jay raged on, going berserk on anything her weapon made contact with and swearing with all of her might, some of the curses not even making any sense.

Some time later when she was fairly sure that she had destroyed every last thing in the dark room, Jay started calming down, panting breaths slowing into a more normal pace and muscles relaxing from being tense in her anger. A sigh escaped her and she swung her weapon back into its normal home across her back. Now that she was (slightly) calmed down and able to (sort of) focus, she took a good look around again. At least the tantrum had given her more time to let her eye really adjust and she spied another door leading out of the room. How she had missed it in her rage, one could never know, since the walls had been fair game.

Upon discovering that the door was locked, Jay broke it. It was made of wood with a glass window, so it made some really nice sounds as she kicked it in, splintering the wood and shattering the glass with a fist (the slashes and embedded pieces of glass that took up residence in result were given little notice). It was too dark to really admire her handiwork, but her disappointment was short-lived as she took a good look into the room beyond the quite destroyed once-a-door.

A green, almost eerie glow illuminated the room and much like a moth being attracted to the flame of a burning candle, Jay honed in on the source of the green light, her feet almost working on their own to get her there. She actually _squealed_ when the source was finally discovered--a computer terminal that was in rather good condition all things considered. Suddenly frantic, she hastily made her way towards the old terminal, swatting the chair before it aside and plunking herself on the floor where it had been, her entire attention now on the softly glowing screen.

One would probably wonder at this point what a fairly unintelligent, mostly insane Super Mutant would want with a computer since they obviously required one to be capable of reading to make use of them at all, but Jay _could_ read. Still, to the average onlooker, it would seem somewhat a futile effort on Jay's part. This Super Mutant though, had a way of surprising you with knowledge when you least expected it.

Sure, it _was_ difficult for her to read, usually time-consuming and completely not worth the effort and yes, part of the reason why she was so elated to see the computer in the first place was because it was _glowing_, but Jay didn't mind everything stacked against her. Jay liked computers. In fact, you could say she _loved_ them. Like her addiction to shiny objects, put a computer anywhere in her vicinity and she'd be all over it in to time flat, latching onto the thing like an overly persistent limpet. With a determined and excited gleam in her eye, she set to work on figuring out the password for the machine, huge fingers not quite helpful with this specific task, but she was dexterous and had surgeon-like control over her hands, which her hair could attest to when it was fully decorated, thin, tight braids in abundance.

It was easy to see why she would be attracted to shiny objects simply due to the fact that they were more visible. It was likewise not any stretch of the imagination whatsoever to figure out why she liked breaking things and generally wrecking havoc on whatever presented itself when she was in the mood (which was nearly always). This though, much like her ability to read in the first place, had absolutely no grounds or discernible reason as to why she knew how to do it at all, yet there she was, hacking away and getting the password with only two mistakes. Practically vibrating in joy now, she set about seeing what there was to be had in the candy-store like atmosphere (at least to her mind, anyway) within the pretty, glowing box.

This wasn't the only out of the blue thing that she just seemed to innately know how to do. Many of the baubles decorating her hair, ears, or otherwise had been manufactured by Jay herself, even down to the steel plates on her boots. She couldn't make things quite perfect, but give her a tool and she could figure it out given time and the complexity of the tool, anything ranging from a screwdriver to a lathe. There was the fact that she could braid her hair and was actually quite good at it as well as other things, like knowing how to sew fabric and stitches, or being capable of sometimes uncanny insight. It was the last of these that, in her rare moments of clarity and something resembling sanity, she wondered about herself and the things she knew.

There was plenty she _didn't_ know, excruciatingly so, but there were these other odd things that she _did_ know that a Super Mutant should just be incapable of. In those sparse moments of self-exploration, Jay sometimes wondered if this was just how she had always been, that the person she was now was the same as the person she was when she was still human albeit more damaged mentally. Obviously, her long-term memory was pretty much shot to hell, and she was certainly less intelligent than she likely would have been, but there were those vague recollections and they always just felt right, nothing odd or off about them at all, no sense of the person in the memory being different than the person remembering it.

One thing she _could_ remember with a stark clarity that she was fairly sure she shouldn't be able to was her own "metamorphosis". She _had_ spoken to some of the others before going off on her own and not a one of them could recall the transformation at all, but Jay remembered it, one of the very few absolutely solid memories she had--the agonizing pain, feeling as if being ripped apart from the inside out, the utter horror and _terror_--all of it was imprinted in excruciating detail, able to be recalled and looked at whenever she liked, not that she really liked or even wanted that specific memory in the first place, yet it was _there_. The memory itself though, was a convenient anchor for remembering other, associated things, such as that sense of her being very similar to how she must have been when human, that she was likely messed up in the head long before even knowing what a Super Mutant was and that becoming one just made it worse, that there was something "wrong" with her own transformation.

Jay didn't quite dwell on these things as she tended to live day-to-day and minute-to-minute, just going with the flow of her own whim and wherever her feet took her, but she did know them, and she did remember them long after the insightful moment was snuffed out from its short-lived existence. It was just that they had absolutely no impact upon her _now_ and in her convoluted, addled mind, they were trivial and unimportant. There were other, much more important things to use her less than ideal (vast understatement, that) amount of mental power on.

One of those was the computer before her now, everything it held ready to be accessed, analyzed, pondered, and ultimately forgotten entirely. The bizarre ability with hacking was balanced out by the simple fact that she hardly ever _learned_ anything from it, let alone remembered what she read. Much like the desire to break things, she simply wouldn't recall what exactly it was she saw even minutes ago. The simple fact was that it was just as trivial and ultimately worthless as breaking stuff was and only done for the enjoyment of that moment in time before she moved onto the next thing.

Going through the contents of this specific computer though, it lit a burning desire to _learn something_ inside her which she was powerless against. Most of the information was utterly useless to her and dismissed, though she did stubbornly read all of it, but she had found the diamond in the rough, the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, something that totally took over her mind, overshadowing the search for light, finding a way out, and being angry about the darkness.

At first glance, the journaling program was pretty insubstantial and easily dismissed, but in Jay's obsessive need to find each and every last bit of information, it _wasn't_ simply looked over. She read the whole thing, top to bottom, bottom to top, repeating the process many times and passing several hours on that one specific task, working _hard_ on making it stick in her brain and Jay was stubborn enough that she might even be capable of succeeding considering the fact that she was effectively immortal and had all the time in the world to devote to this one task alone, though eventually she would need to find a way out of this place to search for something to eat (specifically, something that was simply known as being edible), but Super Mutants didn't require all that much food unless they were injured and water was easy enough to find that it wasn't an issue. Days could pass and she would be just fine.

Over two hundred years ago some human who was likely just as bored and annoyed with the basement as Jay was had used this program to entertain themself. Well, the journal is where they kept the information at any rate and she didn't much care where they had found it originally. That information though, was an absolute treasure trove of knowledge that she simply _needed_ to remember. Logged within, the journal held quite a sizable list of swears and curses in a dizzying number of languages, complete with pronunciations and translations where needed. Here and there whoever had taken this daunting task of archiving such important knowledge for the future of mankind had left annotations, notes describing usage and context for some of the more obscure phrases.

If Jay knew of and believed in heaven, then she would have thought that this must be it.

Not being a religious person (if you asked her about it, she might not even know what the hell you were talking about), nor one to dream of mythical places or paradise, in Jay's little world, she had hit pay dirt and it was time to reap the rewards, no matter _how_ long it took. Certainly, her joy of swearing wasn't nearly as important as, say, shiny objects, but she did enjoy it so and with such a vast wealth of _new_ swears before her, it became her entire focus at that moment. Had she a travel companion, she might have hugged the life out of them at this point, her utter _ecstasy_ at the moment making her actually get up and do a joyful little dance about the room before settling into her task, pushing aside the elation for stubborn, willful seriousness. The celebration was over and now, now was the time for absolute focus (which was a daunting task within itself), concentration (likewise), and the stubbornness of an overfed obese donkey (superior skill in that, at least).


	2. Chapter 2

A half-day's worth of hours later, Jay closed her eyes, covering her left with one hand. An ache was starting up right behind her left eye and she was decidedly queasy and nauseous. This wasn't new to her, so she wasn't surprised, nor concerned, but it did mean she would need to stop her "research" for a while and let everything rest. It was a rather annoying issue and she knew it had something to do with how her eye jerked back and forth rapidly--concentrating on looking at one thing for too long, _especially_ reading and doubly-so when it was on a computer--due to the fact that she had to try and keep it still to be able to see what she was looking at in the first place. In the darkness of these rooms, it was even worse, the darker it was, the harder it was to control it and again, especially when looking at a monitor of any sort, or anything else that lit up.

Popping her neck--it tended to get a cramp in it at times like this since she would crank her head around to one side in order to look out the corner of her eye because it helped her keep it still--Jay pushed herself up off the floor, having another look around at the room she was in. The siren's call of the glowing monitor had made her pretty much not see anything else in the room, so to her, she was seeing it for the first time. Even had she looked around before settling in, she probably would have forgotten it anyway. She could still remember the huge room that she had fallen into only because she had spent so long in there working at her hair. Latching onto the thought of her hair, Jay took up the search for light once more.

The computer-room had two options besides the door she came in and she tilted her head to one side, thinking of which to try first. Had she a coin, she might have flipped it, though only if she could remember what flipping a coin was at that specific moment. Shrugging, she decided on the right one, furthest away from her sore, tired eye. It made sense in her mind, at least.

This door wasn't locked and opened up into some kind of utility area, pipes and wires following the hall away from the door and around a turn, out of sight. Jay clomped along the hallway, the metal grate flooring making a horrific racket in protest, and when she got to the turn, it revealed another room with very dim light coming from a forlorn, yellow bulb beside a metal box attached to the wall. Something about that knocked a memory loose which rattled around in her head a moment, but was gone before she could really get a good hold on it to look. Well, obviously it was _something_ and she dutifully stomp-clanged her way to it.

The metal box had hinges going down one side and a latch on the other which she immediately flipped and considered flipping it a few more times just in case, but the front started swinging away. Instead, she swung the metal door open to have a look inside. With the relatively bright yellow light right beside it, she could make out what was inside of the metal box just fine, which was both good and bad.

Switches ran up and down both sides of the box, labels beside them listing things that were entirely ignored by Jay as she stared at all the switches in awe and curiosity. There was a very strong, hard to ignore temptation to flip every last one and not seeing any real need to fight said temptation, she set to work. Jay was just getting into it when the next switch she flipped actually caused something to happen. In the distance, she could hear increasingly loud sounds coming from other areas in the sub-level, making a _thoom_ noise which each. As they arrived in this room, the sound announced a bright, piercing light suddenly going on above her. Obviously, the emergency lights were working after 200 years.. somehow. Jay hopped up and down, clapping her hands in happiness--she had found light!

Somehow, the Super Mutant managed to _frolic_ back down the access hall, returning to the room with her prized computer in it. That's when a huge problem presented itself to her. Jay really wanted to go back to the computer and pick up where she had left off--she had only really managed to get a quarter of the way through the Spanish entries which she had started with--she could roll her 'r's like nobody's business--able to recall them without looking after drilling them into her head. Really, she had barely scratched the surface of her mission of profanity. She also wanted to sort her treasures now that she had plenty of light to use and everything felt wrong when her hair was empty like this. Her stomach also put in its opinion by rumbling and she was rather inclined to agree with it, though she didn't really need to eat for a while yet, but she _wanted_ to.

If there was one thing Jay really knew, was an expert on even, genius-level knowledge in, it was that she knew _herself_. Like at that moment, she knew that if she went back to the computer, the nagging feeling of her hair would keep interrupting her and destroying what little concentration she was actually capable of. She also knew that the desire to eat would likewise grow rather impatient in its protests. Even given these though, the temptation of that cornucopia of curses was nearly too much.

No! She would resist! These other things needed done! She could live without--Aw hell.

Defeated, she deposited her sizable posterior on its recent home of floor and got back to work. Jay could probably get a couple more hours in before she needed to bother with anything else...

...Five minutes later she made a frustrated growl and looked away from the screen, turning her body to face away from it so she couldn't see it. "You win," she rumbled aloud to nobody in particular as she fished her pouched almost-a-pouch from the real pouch it was inside and went about spreading her treasures out on the floor in front of her. The sight of all the shiny bits of metal scared her fouling mood off immediately and she became totally focused on them, a low rumble vibrating in her throat, but this one was more a happy sound. Jay continued rumbling to herself, deep in her chest, almost like a purr of contentment while she sorted the various items into categories that only made sense to her, lining them up in columns.

Nearly an hour went by as she looked over each and every last piece, making contemplative noises here and there, but not removing any one item from the collection. Jay wanted to keep _all_ of them. Usually, she was able to toss a few out, either because they no longer met her standards for shininess , or because they had begun to rust, or because the item had been plated and the shiny plating was flaking off, but not a one of her current treasures had any of these ailments and she was totally at a loss as to what she was supposed to do _now_.

It was _hard_ for her to make more high-level decisions. Picking which door to go through, or which item to smash first, or what she should try to eat next, those were all fairly easy and tended to just answer themselves for her. Sorting through her "shinies" was slightly more difficult, but could be done due to the importance of the process and that she did have some "rules" to follow that helped answer. Deciding what to do about a dilemma such as this was way beyond her experience. Her entire life was mostly dictated by whim, chance, or need, but none of those came into play here; she had to _think_ about it and come to some sort of conclusion. It actually frightened her a bit.

No, that wasn't right, it frightened her more than a bit, enough so that she nervously looked around the room, anywhere but at her treasures which usually were more than difficult to pull her attention away from in the first place. Muscles started to tense up and her heart rate increased, like it would when she would be lost to the primal bloodlust, except this had no outlet whatsoever and just resulted in making her feel _worse_.

Her voice was no less frightening and guttural than usual, but there was a distinct edge of panic to it as she asked the room, "What I do _now?_" Of course, nothing answered her and she growled a bit in anger, but the vicious sound was halfhearted at best because it wasn't really anger that she was feeling. Jay didn't _know_ what she was feeling, which wasn't really all that strange, but now it bothered the hell out of her because maybe if she knew, it could answer for her.

Making an odd whimpering sound, she looked back down at the junk spread before her, forcing herself to look at it and demand an answer from it, or from herself, or from _anywhere_ really, she wasn't picky, as long as she ended up with an answer. It almost seemed smug as it laid on the floor, mocking, and she growled at it. Jay returned to looking around the room again, as if she was expecting something in the room itself to hold all the secrets to the mysteries in her mind.

A flash of determination came from somewhere and she was hopelessly glad for it, latching onto the feeling as she surged to her feet. She was going to _make_ something answer her! Failing that, she might break something, or a lot of somethings, to make herself feel a little better. Thus began her detailed, thorough search of every last item, down to the dust-bunnies underneath things, searching for the answer to what she was supposed to do.


	3. Chapter 3

Jay had her answer after two hours of searching. Of course, she'd had the answer with her all along, but it simply hadn't presented itself as an answer, merely something that was simply there. Sometimes, the most obvious of things escaped her grasp when other times, she could do extremely complex things that she shouldn't be capable of. This was one of those more simple times.

In her search, she had found two more rooms connected by hallway to the computer room and a flight of stairs that was so full of debris that there was no way she was getting out using that. The other rooms were mostly full of the same things it was full of: desks, long-dead terminals, cabinets, and other office-related things. One thing that didn't quite fit, though wasn't surprising, were the dried skeletons wearing rags of pre-war fabrics, long since rotted to the point where no smell was left behind at all. Some had been tucked up under desks in your standard "duck and cover" position and others had simply sat in their seats, awaiting the apocalypse.

The skeletons didn't call much attention to themselves for Jay until she caught a sparkle out the corner of her eye from a vaguely human-shaped pile of bones mostly hiding under a desk, but partially splayed out from under it. Closer examination revealed that whoever this had been was wearing a silver necklace with a ring hanging from it. The significance of the necklace itself or the reason for the ring's presence utterly escaped Jay, but it had finally answered her question.

Thinking nothing of it, she popped the skull off the long-dead person and collected her prize. The skull, the rest of the body, even the room itself went unnoticed for a few moments as Jay examined the silver chain, captivated by the shiny metal reflecting the harsh brightness of the overhead floodlights. It wasn't the chain itself that had held her answer, but the ring dangling from it. Whatever significance it had held for its previous owner, Jay didn't know nor bother to think about, but for her, it solved the horrible, terrifying problem. A cry of delight escaped her and she skipped back towards the computer room, happy as can be, to get back to work on her treasures.

With some determination (and a few Spanish swears she had just learned earlier), Jay was able to put a small dent in her treasures collection. The new, silver necklace now held, along with its original ring, several nuts, washers, more rings, and other things with holes that she could thread the chain through. It wasn't a sizable difference, but to Jay, it was enough. It satisfied her need to get at least _some_ items out of the lot, and that was really all that mattered. Plus, the new necklace made some very interesting jingling sounds when she'd move and she liked those.

With that dealt with, she set about putting all of her treasures back into her stringy, dirty-gray hair. This was as much a task as taking it down and it took her quite a while, some of the finer braids requiring her to concentrate harder to get them right. Since she had used all the "bead" pieces on her new necklace, she had none to aid her in making the hair stay, and so liberal usage of wire was made, spirals and hooks and tight coils and all other manner of shapes bent into the wire to hold braids and locks in place even while the wire also held other bits of junk as well. It was very tedious and Jay had to work very hard on it, but eventually, she persevered.

Having her hair back up and her treasures safely attached made her feel a lot better, the weight on her scalp comforting in a way that defied description. Shaking her head, she savored the dull clangs and dings as the metal bits bumped each other, making their own weird little tune. Her newest treasure, the now heavily decorated silver necklace went on next, Jay taking many attempts at getting the latch to work due to her large hands. This too made its own myriad of sounds as the pieces on it hit each other and also as the whole mess came into contact with the other necklaces she wore--several chains of varying sizes, lengths, and metals (mostly gold and silver), some of these hand pendants and some were simply just the chain--that she decided she liked. When it was added to the sound of her hair, the resulting noise was somehow soothing to Jay.

Another memory came to her then, vague as all of them were, but enough there for her to get some details out of. A metal disc with long metal rods hanging from it that swayed in the wind, a merry and almost musical sound coming from the odd contraption when the rods made contact to each other. Jay couldn't think of what the thing was called, but she decided that she liked it and she wanted one, though had no clue as to where she would actually put such a thing. There was a scent as well, light and sweet with a hint of some kind of fruit, and it made her stomach rumble.

As always, the vision was gone and she'd forgotten most of it as soon as it left, but the hunger in its wake definitely couldn't be ignored. All she could really remember was the smell of something delicious and a light jingle sound, those too fading fast as she set about thinking what she needed to do now.

Obviously, she needed to find food and to do that meant she needed to find a way out of this predicament. Her stomach was insistent enough now that she could no longer ignore it in pursuit of all those phrases and words she wanted so badly to remember. Jay knew the hallway with the other rooms wasn't going to be helpful as the stairs at its end were too full of debris. Likewise, the utility room she had found was pretty much worthless as it had no other doors in it. That meant, then, that she had to return to the room where this whole mess started and see if there was another way out.

Making her way back to the large room, she saw that her rage earlier had done a good number on the dark room that was now lit with the same glaring white as all the other rooms. She also had taken a moment to survey the door she had broken and bask in its beautiful destruction, the glass like a spiderweb and the base of the door splintered into stakes upon stakes. Thinking about that, she picked at her right hand a little, finally paying attention to the pieces of glass still embedded in her skin.

As the door had been, this room too got a good once-over as Jay idly dug at the skin on her knuckles, idly picking pieces of glass out and letting them drop from her fingers, instantly forgotten. The room was absolutely trashed, some of the walls having great cracks and pits in them--she just now noticed that they were actually cement as it hadn't really occurred to her earlier since thinking is rather difficult during the rage. The room _had_ been full of shelves and what she thought might be bookcases but wasn't sure. Now, it was just full of debris, barely anything left standing and even what still stood only did so precariously.

After taking a while to admire her handiwork, she moved on to the great large room. The lights holding off the darkness were set high on the walls, making Jay wonder if there was some way to get to them, because if there was, she could get to the hole she'd fallen through. Nothing presented itself to her, though. All that she could see were crates, boxes, metal shelves with more of the same. The shelves perked her interest for a moment, but she considered and then dismissed them. There was no way those could hold her weight and besides, they wouldn't get her high enough anyway.

Beyond the clutter of crates and boxes though, she could see a part of the room that extruded to one side, away from where she was standing. That was interesting enough to grab her attention and her feet followed soon after leaving her standing into the smaller area. Here two options presented themselves to her, but then they were both facing the same direction so she couldn't be sure they went to the same place or not. Both were Slightly taller than Jay herself and as wide as ten of her, and maybe then some. The two doors stood side-by-side and were made of segmented metal pieces that ran horizontally, a switch box beside both. Those definitely drew her in and she was examining one before she really thought about it. Many flicks of both switches later proved to be a wasted effort though as they did nothing.

She had seen these kind of doors before and knew that they opened upward instead of outward. Normally, there was a control nearby, like the switch boxes, that would set them to moving and they would open themselves, but that was obviously not the case here. Jay figured they couldn't be _too_ heavy and she could probably lift one if she really tried or, if not that, then break one of them thoroughly enough that she could get through. The breaking one option was very, very appealing, but she decided, with some reluctance, to try opening one first.

Hunkering down in front of one of the doors, she crouched and braced her feet, spread apart enough so she had perfect balance along with the strength in her legs. A few false tries and she managed to work her large fingers up underneath the bottom of the door as it was padded on the bottom with a rubbery substance that gave and finally moved aside given the right amount of force. Clenching her teeth, she gathered up every last ounce of stubborn willpower in her system and pushed _hard_ with her legs. The door gave a loud, metallic groan of protest and in reply, Jay just pushed harder, all of her strength focused into pushing the door upwards.

Just when she was about to give up and break the damned thing, there was another, much louder sound, and then a scraping, awful noise as the door finally submitted and slowly let itself be pushed upwards, still straining against its rusty tracts and locked wheels. This tension too began to give, pushing the door up becoming easier, and Jay was finally able to push it all the way up, making a happy grunt when it stayed up as she let it go.

She let out a whoop of joy, doing a little dance, then fell into a sitting position with a mighty thud of sound. Her legs were shaking from the effort it had taken to get the ancient garage door to move and she decided she deserved a break. As she sat, pondering her victory over that accursed portcullis, she looked out beyond to see where it lead. A concrete ramp lead upwards, walled in on both sides by more of the same, daylight streamed down into the lower level, stopping some twenty odd feet from the door. Jay grinned--which was a fearsome look and would have most people running for the hills--as she looked up into the clear, yellow-tinged sky above, nostrils flaring to catch the sweet scent of the outside as it blew in, overpowering the dank, musty smell of the old basement.

Now she could go get the food she needed whenever she liked, water included as she had found none in the basement, and she could still return to her little treasure trove of profanity to begin the lesson anew. Life, to Jay, just got a whole lot better and she felt light-hearted and carefree for the moment, not that she didn't always feel that way, but it was especially potent right then and she basked in the feeling of utter bliss. For the first time in her life that wasn't made of vague memories and ghosts of sights and sounds, Jay had found Home.


End file.
